WHY IS THE CALIFORNIA BAR SO RACIST? Racial Disparities Persist In California Bar Exam Pass Rates: White: 72%, Asian: 66%, Hispanic: 61%, Black: 31%.

Actually, we looked into this kind of thing among our own graduates some years back, and it turns out that bar passage rates correlate pretty tightly with LSAT scores. This isn’t surprising: One’s a big stressful law-related exam, and the others a bigger, more stressful law-related exam. So if you admit a cohort with lower LSAT scores, that cohort will tend to have a lower bar passage rate. And it’s not linear — there’s a cutoff below which the passage rate plummets sharply. This is, in fact, well-known in legal academia. Many think it’s immoral to admit students at or below that cutoff because their chance of passing the bar is so low. But many schools do so anyway.